


to be (zuko)

by grumpyhedgehogs



Series: if hamlet from himself be ta'en away [3]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Beginnings of Found Family, Brainwashing, Canon-Typical Violence, Dysfunctional Family, Family Feels, Fighting, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Mild Blood, Mind Control, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Recovery, The Gaang Learns How Zuko Got The Scar (Avatar), Trauma, Zuko Joins The Gaang Early (Avatar), hurt zuko, mild violence, the gaang took one look at what the dai li did to zuko and said step the fuck up kyle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:08:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28537839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grumpyhedgehogs/pseuds/grumpyhedgehogs
Summary: “I. Am not. Joo Lee.” Zuko grits out, eyes wild.“No,” Aang promises. “You’re not. We know you’re not. You just can’t remember that sometimes.”
Relationships: Aang & Zuko (Avatar), Azula & Zuko (Avatar), Iroh & Zuko (Avatar), Katara & Zuko (Avatar), Sokka & Zuko (Avatar), Toph Beifong & Zuko, Zuko (Avatar) & Everyone
Series: if hamlet from himself be ta'en away [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2088897
Comments: 23
Kudos: 526





	to be (zuko)

**Author's Note:**

> I had this all written up this morning--and then the power went out. Enjoy this fic as a last holiday present before I have to start university classes again tomorrow. 
> 
> Final piece in my "Dai Li brainwashed Zuko into being Joo Lee" series. Link to the tumblr post with the original idea in the first part of the series.

“I’d say this was a pleasant surprise,” Azula drawls, blue flames sliding lazily between her fingertips, “but I really can’t be bothered with you all right now. Shouldn’t you be off trying to find your pet cow somewhere?”

“Maybe we could be a little quieter?” Katara mutters from Sokka’s side. The earth rumbles beneath their feet and Toph shifts anxiously. That’s all the signal Sokka needs to know they’re about to have even more unwanted company. He wonders how Zuko is doing down the hall. If Joo Lee walks back out of that room Sokka  _ will  _ scream.

“Appa is a flying bison,” Aang retorts hotly, like Sokka isn’t holding him back from a fight with a murderous fourteen year old, “and he’s a better friend than you’ll ever be!”

“Aang, shut up!”

“Is that so?”

“Shh!” The acrobat friend gets involved now, looking back over her shoulder before tugging on the Fire Princess’s sleeve. “You guys, no one knows we’re down here!”

“Yes! If you were a better friend to your own brother, he wouldn’t be a prisoner being brainwashed by the Dai Li right now!”

Sokka’s heart sinks to the floor when the sound of clanking Earth Kingdom armor fills the hallway behind him. He has just enough time to wrap his arms around Aang and Katara and haul them both against the wall before blue flame splits the space where they’ve been standing. Toph hops into the air, quick as can be, and ping pongs off of the walls, creating little ledges for herself until she lands beside the rest of her group without a hair out of place. Show-off.

The Dai Li sprint down the tunnel, shouting and throwing boulders. Azula waves a hand and flame rips into the rock, burning it all to dust. “A prisoner of the Dai Li, huh, Avatar?” She asks, a smirk splitting her blood red lips. The leading soldiers swallow nervously and pull more earth to their fists. “You don’t _ say.  _ You know, I might have heard a little something like that myself. Why don’t we test out how good these elite Dai Li really are?” 

“Run!” Sokka shouts as the fighting begins, and shoves Aang in front of him. The door to whatever torture chamber they created Joo Lee in is still open ahead of them. Sokka releases his boomerang into the head of a Dai Li agent who snatches at the back of Aang’s collar as they slip past.  Katara and Toph bring up the rear, Toph sending waves of earth to slow the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom fighters behind them. Katara’s water flows deftly between her palms, striking out at anyone who gets too close. There’s a moment where everything narrows down to the open doorway--until a familiar lowing grows louder from further down the hallway.

“Appa!”

~

Aang gets ready to be hit with rock--the bender in front of him is fast, too fast for his burgeoning earthbending prowess--and squeezes his eyes shut. At least training with Toph has gotten him used to being punched in the face with boulders.

Sokka and Katara have veered off to get Appa, shouting about an escape route, and the five remaining Dai Li in the room had jumped at him and Toph the moment they stepped inside. (“No one sticks to the plan!” Sokka cries despairingly before punching a Dai Li agent in the gut.)

Toph is handling three of the agents--one of them has already been knocked unconscious by a kick to the head Aang is pretty proud of--which is, of course, amazing, but doesn’t help him right now. He really needs more space to dodge, he can’t jump into the air with how low the tunnel ceilings are--

A resounding  _ thud _ echoes through the chamber as the agent staggers from a blow from behind, groans, and falls at Aang’s feet. Aang blinks, gapes, and looks up into Prince Zuko’s familiar face. His nose is bleeding again. His wrists are very red, and twice their natural size. He drops the chunk of rock he is holding.

“I. Am not. Joo Lee.” Zuko grits out, eyes wild.

“No,” Aang promises. “You’re not. We know you’re not. You just can’t remember that sometimes.”

“Very good performance, big brother.” 

Aang whips around, mouth dry as a bone, to find Crazy Princess Azula leaning in the doorway. She’s as scuffed and battered as the rest of them, but as she sends flames racing towards one of the Dai Li attacking Toph, burning him nearly to a crisp, she looks anything but ruffled. 

Zuko shifts beside Aang, and Aang knows that look by now--he winces as Joo Lee’s blank gaze slots back into place. Zuko tilts his head curiously and Aang has to resist the urge to reach out and take his hand in comfort. “Big brother? I’m not sure what--” 

He cuts himself off, which Aang is going to take as a good sign. Zuko’s always been a fighter, if not a very nice one.

Azula’s expression does some interesting gymnastics before she scowls. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised my face doesn’t break through to you, Zuzu. You never did appreciate me enough.”

“Don’t call me that,” Zuko snaps, and he sounds so much like himself Aang wants to cry. Across the room, Toph scoffs at their dramatics and punches a soldier in the face. Zuko’s nose bleeds even more, but this time he has the presence of mind to reach up and wipe it away irritably. “That’s not my name.”

“Do you even know your name right now, Zuzu?”

Zuko doesn’t answer.

In a second, his little sister is across the room, leaning into Zuko’s face. Aang yelps, pulling at his airbending instinctively, but she doesn’t move to hurt either of them. Instead, more gentle than he’s ever seen her, Azula rests her hand against Zuko’s face.

Against the _scarred_ side of Zuko’s face.

“Here’s something that’ll help you remember,” Azula says softly, and Aang can’t tell whether the undercurrent to her words is cruelty or not. “It’s the anniversary, Zuko. This week all these years ago, Father made his choice about you. I don’t think you’ll forget that as easily as you’ve forgotten me and Uncle Iroh.”

(Aang feels a prickle at the backs of his eyes and knows, suddenly and desperately, that he cannot let Zuko go back to the Fire Nation. He’ll have to tell the others.)

Zuko breathes in sharply, flinches, and raises his hand to clutch at his sister’s--but there’s no time left. 

Appa’s lowing shakes the walls around them, rattling the chains on the chair Zuko had been sitting in--strapped into--as his friend gets closer. Aang hears Toph shout for help from behind them, Sokka and Katara’s voices raised in the hallway. They have to get out of here. He chances one last look at the scar on Zuko’s face, the swollen wrists. (He must have struggled when they pushed him down. They might have broken his bones. He had to wriggle his way out when Aang burst in, had to shed blood to come to Aang’s aid.) They have to get Zuko out of here. 

Aang holds out his hand. “I know you’re Zuko. I can help you remember.”

Zuko pulls away from his sister, who for a second seems unbalanced before she reverts to her customary haughty boredom, and frowns at him. “We--aren’t friends, are we?”

“We could be. If you wanted.”

Zuko looks at Azula. Azula rolls her eyes, making a big show of examining her nails. “Oh, get out of here, big brother. I’ll always find you when I need you.”

Zuko takes his hand. 

It is only when they are at the door, ready to run with the Dai Li closing in, that Azula calls out once more. “Oh, and Zuzu? You really should get your head looked at.”  Then her sharp eyes land on Aang and she bares her teeth, sending shivers down Aang’s spine. “Don’t get this wrong, Avatar; I’m only letting you go because I can’t leave with Zuko. Ba Sing Se is mine. You stick around and I’ll kill you, with or without my dear brother’s help.”

Aang grips Zuko’s hand hard. Zuko goes with him when Aang pulls him away. 

~

“We have to go!” Toph speeds up, leaping to climb up Appa’s rump and slide into the saddle. Katara flings off the last of Appa’s chains and reaches down to help Zuko and Aang. “Hurry up!”

“Wait!”

She groans, but it’s better to hear Zuko’s annoyingly loud shouting than Joo Lee’s quiet deference, so Toph listens. The Dai Li are in shambles anyway; they’re no match for both Toph  _ and  _ the Fire Nation ladies.

“Joo Dee is down here,” Zuko pants. She can hear his pulse hammering, faster than even when they’d been interrogating Joo Lee. “All of the women they made into Joo Dee--I can’t leave them behind.”

“Do you even know where they are?” Sokka yells back. “It’s a maze down here! We have to go!”

“I can’t leave them behind,” Zuko repeats. “I  _ won’t _ . You don’t have to help me find them, but I can’t go with you. Thank you for helping me escape, but it isn’t right. I won’t go when I know people from this nation can’t trust their own leaders not to harm them.”

“Well, I’d say Zuko is back,” Toph reasons. “If only because I’m pretty sure Joo Lee doesn’t know that many words.” She leans out of the saddle, grips both the Prince of the Fire Nation and the Last of the Airbenders by the backs of their necks, and hauls them up onto Appa like a mother cat with her kittens. Appa, the good old boy, starts moving immediately. She turns to Zuko. “I can track their pulses if I’m on the ground, but up here you’ll have to do the navigating. Do you know the way?”

Zuko points towards the next bend in the tunnels. “Take a right, follow the green lights, not the yellow. Yellow lanterns lead--they--” He stifles more blood as it pours down his face; Toph hears it trickling between his fingers and grimaces. Aang pats his back. “I think--they lead outside. Green leads to the--experimentation rooms. I--tried to memorize them, to get out. I--”

“Zuko?”

“Can’t--I’m sorry--” Zuko strangles out, before his pulse drops so dramatically Toph flinches, hard, and gasps when he goes on calmly, “I don’t know who you mean. My name is--”

“ _Zuko_ , your name is Zuko.” Toph butts in firmly. They skid around the corner, Katara directing them. Sokka throws and catches his boomerang, throws and catches. The Dai Li are still coming. The crackle of firebending slams into her eardrums, and in the distance Azula begins to cackle. “You are not going to be Joo Lee ever again. Let’s just get Joo Dee and get out of here.”

“Ye--yes. I am not Joo Lee. I’m not Joo Lee. My name is Zuko.”

The Joo Dee ladies are eerily similar to Joo Lee. 

“My name is Joo Dee,” says the woman in front of the small group. She tilts her head, her short dark hair brushing her jaw, and smiles at Zuko as he holds out his hand. “Aren’t you my brother, Joo Lee? Have you come to take us to tour the lovely city of Ba Sing Se?”

“I’m not Joo Lee,” Zuko tells her lowly. “And you don’t have to be Joo Dee. I’ve come to help you go home.”

Her brilliant smile must dim because Toph can hear her lips moving, her eyes darting in her skull. Her heartbeat speeds up and her voice softens instantly; she must be a new recruit. “Home?”

“You don’t have to stay with the Dai Li. None of us do.”

The woman who is not named Joo Dee takes Zuko’s hand.

Zuko guides them into the saddle with help from the rest of Toph’s friends, and politely waits until they are out of the tunnels and in Ba Sing Se proper before he stumbles away from Appa and vomits violently into a gutter. Toph really doesn’t blame him; Joo Dee smiles sound somehow even worse than the Joo Lee variety. 

In the end, it’s not hard to convince him to escape Ba Sing Se with them. 

(Azula’s blue flames had flared and shone behind them the entire way out of the tunnels. There is no further word said about the exhalted Dai Li.)

(Zuko stays with Appa during the fight with his sister. Toph may or may not have tied him to the saddle. Sokka may or may not have been an accomplice. But it wasn’t hard to convince the Prince to sleep; he’s exhausted, dark rings under his eyes, and he seems less confused when he wakes up.)

(The nightmares are another problem.)

(Azula pulls her punches. Mai’s knives don’t seem to hit their targets as often. Ty Lee giggles, pinches Sokka’s cheek, and tells him in no uncertain terms that if anything happens to Zuko it will be on all of their heads. Azula smirks the whole time.)

~

“Do you remember anything about what happened to you?” 

Katara waits to ask for a few days, a week at most. She lets the water flow over Zuko’s wrists, and the whole idea of helping the Prince of the Fire Nation seems less strange when she watches bruises begin to disappear. They’re layered, new over old. He’s been held down many times. “I know it’s not nice to think about, but it’ll help you keep Joo Lee away if you talk about being Zuko.”

“They found us in the tea shop.” Zuko says very, very quietly. Katara sits as still as she can, afraid that any sudden movement might scare him off. Whatever Azula referenced--and she has her suspicions, but thinking about their implications makes Katara’s skin crawl--has mostly banished Joo Lee from existence. But she’d be lying if she said it didn’t leave scars; Zuko isn’t trying to attack the Avatar. He’s almost entirely silent. He lets Katara heal him but never asks her to--and probably never would if she didn’t force it on him. She’s never seen Zuko so passive. “My Uncle... He’s older, and he’d been hurt before we all fought Azula outside the city. He said he was fine, but I could tell he was still limping by the time the Dai Li found us out. There was only one way he was going to be able to get away, so I stayed behind to distract them when Uncle wasn’t looking.”

“You sacrificed yourself for him.”

Zuko shrugs. “He’s family.”

Katara doesn’t have anything to say to that. She settles for drawing as much pain out of him as she can.

(Azula was very clear on just how the Fire Lord’s family treated each other to get what they wanted.)

“Is there anything else I can help with? Any more pain?” She’ll have to refill her waterskin soon. They need to get more food into Zuko; he looks ready to faint every time Appa gets high enough that the air is thinner. His memory is getting better slowly but surely, and her waterbending does seem to help with the headaches and the slips in identity. It’s a process.

Zuko hesitates, hesitates, and then touches his jaw lightly, right at the hinge beside his ear. His newly grown hair nearly covers it, but upon closer inspection, there are deep scrapes there. It looks like something abrasive rubbed the skin clean away; dried blood flakes off as she brushes his hair aside for a better view.

“ _ Oh! _ ”

“They’d had Joo Dee candidates bite them before. And they knew my Uncle can breathe fire, so they--” he mimes a muzzle. Katara has to shut her eyes. Very softly, Zuko finishes, “They hurt me.”

Zuko is Fire Nation. Zuko is his father’s son. Zuko is the enemy.

Zuko thanked them for helping him. Zuko didn’t try to turn Aang over to his sister when he’d had the chance. Zuko wouldn’t leave abused women to die in Ba Sing Se.

“I’m sorry, Zuko,” Katara says, and finds it isn’t hard to mean it. “I’m so, so sorry.”

~

Zuko waits almost two weeks before he inquires as to the date that they’ll drop him off with his Uncle Iroh.

(It’s long enough that they’ve had several secret conferences about it. Toph, the only one of them who’d heard the stories about the schism in the Fire Lord’s family, repeated the rumors her parents tried to hide from her.

“I don’t know how much of it is true,” Toph had stressed. Her toes curled in the dirt, her fists clenched at her sides. There was no enemy to punch into submission here. “But I know that people talk about how his face is really burned and that there are wanted posters of him that neither the Water Tribes nor the Earth Kingdom take credit for.”

Sokka still has a hard time stomaching food when he stares at Zuko’s burn for too long now. He misses the days when good and evil were very different shades of blue and red.)

Sokka looks at Katara. Katara looks at Aang. Aang looks at Toph. Toph looks at no one and punches Sokka in the arm. 

“Uh, we don’t really know where Iroh is, Zuko.” Katara told them to use Zuko’s name as often as possible. It’s supposed to help him stay away from Joo Lee. “And we’re kinda on a tight schedule so we can’t really stop to look.”

“So drop me anywhere. I know how to make it on my own. I’ll find Uncle myself.”

“Mm. Nope. Don’t think so. Zuko, we don’t know if you’ll accidentally turn back into Joo Lee. Better to have some supervision, don’t you think?”

“You left the Joo Dee ladies alone.”

“They had families to take care of them,” Sokka points out and immediately recognizes his mistake. Zuko puffs up visibly, bristling. 

“Uncle Iroh  _ is  _ my family. And I don’t need your help!”

This is getting them nowhere. Sokka’s heart twists when Zuko starts looking around for an exit. He’s very glad they decided to have this discussion while Appa is flying.  _ No getting away from us now, Sparky. _

(Aang is right. They can’t let Zuko go back to the Fire Nation.)

“Sometimes the people who love you don’t do what’s right by you.” Toph says very softly. “Sometimes adults are selfish, or they think they’re helping you, or sometimes they just plain don’t listen. Sometimes you have to choose what to do for yourself. Even if you  _ are  _ just a kid.”

“Uncle didn’t leave me behind.” Zuko snaps, but it’s weaker this time. “I chose to stay. I had to stop the Dai Li from getting to him. And I  _ did. _ ”

“You did,” Katara agrees. “You did really well protecting Iroh, Zuko. But you shouldn’t have had to. You shouldn’t have had to do any of the stuff your family--your  _ father  _ made you do.”

Zuko’s even more agitated now; smoke filters between his fingers. But flames don’t spark. He’s been meditating lately, to get rid of Joo Lee and focus his inner flame enough to get back to bending. Sokka doesn’t really get it, but Aang does better at meditation when he has a partner and Zuko hasn’t flambeed them all yet, so that’s nice. “We aren’t even friends. You all think I’m evil--and I’ve hurt you. You shouldn’t  _ want _ to help me.”

It takes a special quality, Sokka observes, for someone to argue  _ against _ their own best interest. It makes his throat tight to think about.

(Zuko doesn’t refute Katara’s point about his father. Sokka holds onto the hope that ignites.)

“Just stay for a little while,” Aang offers. He’s got that wide-eyed look on, the one that makes Sokka do stupid things like give Aang half his food at dinnertime. “Just until you’re sure that Joo Lee isn’t gonna come back. You can tell us about the Fire Nation, and we’ll tell you about where we come from. Wouldn’t it be nice to take a break from trying to capture and fight each other so much? We could just talk. And if when you’re feeling better you still want to leave, we’ll help you find Iroh then.”

Zuko wavers. Sokka’s spare clothes still look strange on him, but Sokka finds he’s not as affronted at seeing Zuko in borrowed Water Tribe blue as much as he would have thought a couple weeks ago. Then Zuko crosses his arms over his chest, leans back in the saddle, and scowls at all of them. It’s just like old times!

(It’s so much better than Joo Lee’s smile that Sokka could hug the stupid firebender.)

“Only,” Zuko allows, “if you have tea.”


End file.
